A House in Progress: The Living Room

The living room remains one of the emptiest rooms in our house. Being a young couple, we don't quite have a house full of furniture yet. Good pieces of secondhand furniture are hard to find and we don't really have it in the budget right now for new. As a reminder, this is the living room we started with:

The first thing to go was the curtains. I'm sure they were nice in the eighties when they were put up. But they were old and dusty, probably hadn't been cleaned since they were put up, and I just didn't care for them. I stripped almost all of the curtains from the house. A clean slate.

A very clean slate. Empty! We had established a little "library" on the left side but that was about it. Newlyweds with no money! was our excuse for months. It wasn't working anymore. First thing we did was move Mike's office downstairs into the "library." When we moved in, I had already thought it would be a good place for an office. I envisioned a wall built with french doors opening into the office.

More furniture filled up the room a bit. It also got me thinking I need to do more to fix it up! Mike likes having his desk by the window and being able to look outside. He also hates it when the sun starts to go down and shines in his eyes. His priority: curtains now!

Here is the other side of the room. The outdoor furniture currently take up space in this room, but not for long (I hope!). Spring should be getting here soon and then they will go back outside. I need to find some secondhand furniture - maybe a couple of chairs I could reuphoslter? - to complete this side of the room. It would be nice to have a little sitting area here for chatting with guests and taking care of paperwork and sorting the mail.

I went ahead and ordered fabric for curtains:

http://www.fabric.com/home-decor-fabric-designer-home-decor-fabric-premier-prints-home-decor-fabric-premier-prints-abstract-geometric-fabric-premier-prints-towers-onyx-natural.aspx

The fabric is Premiere Prints Towers in Onyx/Natural from fabric.com. I have had very good luck with Premiere Prints in the past and love the quality you get for the price (always $7-10 a yard at fabric.com). I used a coupon code I found online and got an additional 15% off, which helped. Our front room has four large windows requiring 20 yards of fabric. Expensive but hopefully worth it! Next step: sewing and hanging the curtains!